Miss Corson. You can use it if you want to. Knead butter in the part of the dough that is designed for rolls—say a tablespoonful of butter; put it in when you are doing the five minutes’ kneading. There is no reason why you should not knead in anything that your fancy calls for, providing it is edible.
Now I will show you how you can prevent the juice running out of fruit pies. For fruit pies—pies made in the summer time, of juicy fruits—better use no under crust. Take a deep dish; put the fruit into the dish, heaping it a little, just as I heaped the apples; wet the edges of the dish with cold water; lay the pastry on the dish and press it very slightly, not on the edge itself, because that makes the pastry heavy, but just inside of the edge. As I press it I leave the edge intact; press the pastry against the dish all the way round; then with your finger make a little groove all the way round your pie, inside the edge of the crust; then, with a little knife, cut holes in the groove. Now, when the juice of the fruit boils out, as it will, instead of forcing its way out of the edges, the crust will be held upon the wet dish, and the fruit juice will boil out in the little groove and stay there. To serve the pie, you cut the upper crust with a sharp knife, and serve with a spoon, taking a piece of crust and plenty of fruit out on each plate. No under crust is there. If you have an under crust with very juicy pie it will be pretty sure to be soggy and heavy. The English way of serving these pies is a very nice one, and is, as I have described, with whipped cream. Serve whipped cream with a fruit pie. Among other nice things that we can not get in this country is Devonshire cream, which is a cream almost as thick as the hard sauce you make by mixing powdered sugar and egg together; it is thick enough almost to cut. We can not get that cream here, but use thick, nice cream, sweetened or not, as you like. One of my English friends, who first taught me this way of serving pie, said that at her home they never sweetened the cream; they simply whipped it to a froth and served it piled up on a dish by the side of the pie. The pie was taken out on a plate, and then two or three spoonfuls of this whipped cream laid on the plate by the side of the pie. You can sweeten it if you like.
MERINGUE.
I will next make a meringue. I have already told you to use the whites of three eggs, three tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar—and that really must be pulverized very fine and sifted. In beating the eggs you can always get them light very quickly, if they are reasonably cold in the beginning, by beating with a change of movement. Beat until your hand grows tired, and then simply change the way you hold the beater. Don’t stop beating. Of course you can use any kind of an egg-whip you like. This which I use is made of twisted wire. Only take care to have the egg beaten entirely stiff. Do not have any liquid egg in the bottom of the bowl. In the summer time you can cool the egg by putting in a little pinch of salt if it does not beat stiff at once. I would not advise using an egg that had the least odor about it. As soon as the custard in the pudding is done we are going to take the pudding out of the oven, and put the meringue on the top, whether the apples are done or not. It does not do any harm to stop beating for awhile. Mix this, using a cutting motion, not a stirring motion. Mix until the sugar and egg are smoothly blended, and the meringue is ready to use.
LECTURE FIFTH.
Our lesson this morning is cream of salmon; shoulder of lamb, boned and roasted; force meat or stuffing for roast meats; potatoes, boiled and baked; and cheese crusts. I shall begin with the lamb or mutton.
Remove the bone first, then stuff and bake the meat, as I have no facilities for roasting with this stove; but I will have something to say about the process of roasting in the course of the lesson. A great many of the ladies think that the shoulder or fore quarters of meat is not so desirable a piece for use as the loin or hind quarter, but that is a mistake. In the first place the proportion of bone in the fore quarter is very much less than in the hind quarter. In one lesson that I gave, about a week ago, at Cleveland, I had a butcher remove all the bones from a fore quarter weighing between five and six pounds, and then weighed the bones: They weighed a pound and a quarter. I also had him remove the bones from the hind quarters and weighed them, and they weighed more. The meat of the fore quarter is sweeter, and quite as nutritious as the meat of the hind quarter, and the fore quarter is always cheaper. So that, you see, on the score of flavor and economy, the fore quarter is more desirable for use than the hind quarter. In England, where mutton is always in perfection, it is the fore quarter or shoulder of mutton that is served to guests, and the hind quarter is the one that is used for the family dinner.
To make the dish which I am going to prepare this morning, I have had the whole quarter brought in so that I can show you how the shoulder should be cut off. Simply with a large piece of the outside skin attached. Usually the butcher might cut the shoulder square off close, but I want this large piece of skin for stuffing. There is a natural division between the shoulder and the ribs, so that the shoulder comes off with perfect ease. If you buy an entire fore quarter like that you will have the butcher cut off the shoulder for roasting or baking, then let him cut the neck in rather small pieces for stews or mutton broth. What is called the rack or ribs would be cut into chops for broiling or frying, and the breast would be cut off entire to be stewed or roasted or baked. A very nice way to prepare the breast is to have the bones all taken out, spread a layer of nice force meat or stuffing over it, roll it up, and tie it. Then it can be baked, or roasted, or stewed. Another nice way to cook the breast is to boil it until it is tender enough to enable you to pull the bones out without any difficulty; then take out all the bones, put it on a platter, set another platter on top of it with a heavy weight on the top platter, and press it until it is cold. Then cut it in rather small pieces, about two or three inches square, and bread and fry it. The process of breading and frying is accomplished in this way. You have cracker crumbs—cracker crumbs rolled and sifted—or bread crumbs, stale bread, dried in the oven and rolled and sifted, in a large dish. In another dish beat a couple of eggs until they are liquid. It does not need to be frothy, but simply to have the substance of the egg well broken; then dip the little pieces of boiled lamb, first in the cracker dust, then in the beaten egg, then again in the cracker dust. That is called breading. To fry properly, so that you have no grease, you want the frying kettle half full of fat. You don’t want a little fat in a frying pan, but a frying kettle like that which you use in frying doughnuts. Put the kettle over the fire and let the fat get hot, that is, let it get so hot that it begins to smoke. When the fat begins to smoke you plunge whatever article you wish to fry into it. If you take the precaution to do that, have plenty of fat and let it get smoking hot and then fry in it, you will never have anything greasy. The action of the hot fat at once so carbonizes the surface of what you wish to fry, and prevents the soaking of the fat. Fry whatever article you are treating until it is a light brown, then take it out of the fat with a skimmer, and lay it on brown paper for a moment—coarse brown paper—and that will absorb the very little fat on the surface. It will be perfectly free from grease. You can season before you bread an article, or you can season the bread crumbs or cracker dust which you use in breading, just as you like. Or, after the article is fried you can season it with salt and pepper. Some things are seasoned after the frying—for instance, Saratoga potatoes—they are always salted after frying. You can make bread crumbs very fine by using a fine sieve and sifting. If you have cracker meal already prepared you will see that it is as fine as Indian meal; it is sold in the grocery stores and at the cracker factories, and it is cheaper to buy cracker dust or cracker meal than it is to make it at home, if you buy the whole crackers, because, of course the manufacturers can afford to use their broken crackers—they are all perfectly good—in making cracker meal and sell that very much cheaper than they can sell the whole crackers. The question of the digestibility of fried articles of food is very often raised. You understand that the hard fried surface is less digestible than any soft surface, and many fried articles are indigestible because of the quantity of grease they contain. If you fry in the way I have told you, you will not have that excess of grease.